Recent Posts

Congratulations to everyone involved in the launch of the new journal Plants, People, Planet, “… a new cross-disciplinary Open Access journal from the New Phytologist Trust focusing on the interface between plants and society.” I’m sure that we’ll be seeing some terrific articles in this new…

I think trees are awesome, and I mean that in the truest sense of the word. They dwarf us in height, and when we look at a tree that has lived for hundreds or thousands of years it is impossible not to think of that span in terms of human generations and human history. But, trees don’t live or grow…

Pilostyles are only visible when their fruit and flowers erupt out of their host plants.
The Conversation/Wikipedia
Steve Wylie; Jen Mccomb, and Kevin Thiele, University of Western Australia
In 1946, forestry officer Charles Hamilton found something unusual on a shrubby native pea plant…

https://plantae.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Picture1-3.jpg638860Mary Williamshttps://plantae.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/PlantaeLogo-1.pngMary Williams2018-08-14 06:28:372018-08-14 09:14:13The mysterious Pilostyles is a plant within a plant

Even without knowing a lot about parasitic plants, you can probably guess some of the insights that come from the first parasitic plant genomic sequence. Because parasitic plants get their nutrients from another organism (functionally, they become heterotrophic), you might expect they would gradually…

Plants rely on two branches of the innate immunity system to prevent or eliminate microbial infections: one involves cell surface receptors to respond to pathogen- or microbe- associated molecular patterns, and the other acts inside plant cells by using proteins with nucleotide-binding site (NBS) and…

Many fungi are pathogens that kill or weaken their plant hosts. However, there are also many species that form beneficial relationships with plants, algae, and cyanobacteria. One of these mutualisms is the mycorrhizal association between a fungus and a plant root, where the fungus provides the plant…

Are you curious about why and how angiosperms, flowering plants, are the youngest lineage of land plants and have become the most abundant group of plants? You are not alone. Generations of botanists and evolutionary biologists have wondered about this same thing. Many questions have been answered, such…

Nobody doubts the great insights we have gained about plant diversity and evolution from genome sequencing, but the patchy nature of available genomes within the plant phylogeny remains a problem. Cheng et al. describe the 10KP (10,000 Plants) Genome Sequencing Project, which aims to sequence genomes…

Lichen are quite special, as they don’t exist independently of their partnership. Lichen are composed of a fungal partner and a photosynthetic partner (the algal or cyanobacterial photobiont), and these partnerships have evolved independently many times. Spribille provides an overview of some of…